Rightwing French leaders have condemned as "sacrilege" a decision to allow a provocative Muslim rapper to play the Bataclan concert hall in Paris where jihadists massacred 90 people three years ago.

ADVERTISING

Singer Medine - who caused an outcry when he attacked hardline secularists in a controversial 2015 song, "Don't Laik", a week before the Charlie Hebdo killings - is to play the Bataclan for two nights in October.

French opposition leader Laurent Wauquiez said he was shocked that "someone who sings about 'crucifying secularists' and calls himself 'Islamo-scum'" would appear at the venue "less than three years after Islamist barbarism cost the lives of 90 of our compatriots.

"It is sacrilege and dishonours France," the leader of the Republicans party tweeted.

The Bataclan's co-director Jules Frutos did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

But the former leader of one of the Bataclan's victims' groups, Emmanuel Domenach, sent stinging replies to both Wauquiez and Le Pen's tweets: "It's crazy for you to use the victims of terrorism for your sterile controversy.

"What level of dishonour does that put you in?" he asked.

Victims' group Life for Paris also defended the Bataclan, saying it was against censorship and that the venue should be free to book who it wanted.

"We will not let anyone use the memory of the victims for political ends, as is the case here," it said in a statement.

'I'm Muslim. Don't panik'

The bearded Medine, who comes from the northern port of Le Havre and is of Algerian descent, has denied that he is an Islamist, comparing himself to "a bomb disposal expert who has been mistaken for someone who plants them".

His fans pointed out that his song "Jihad" - which former interior minister Brice Hortefeux said he would have brought charges against Medine for releasing - was in fact a cry against violence and war between religions and cultures.

Medine, 35, also co-authored a 2012 book "Don't Panik" with a leading French academic which they said was an attempt to take the heat out of the French culture war over Islam.

His record company also sells a line of T-shirts bearing the legend: "I'm Muslim. Don't panik."

But he became the bete noire of hardline secularists after 11 people were killed in a jihadist attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January 2015, only a week after his "Don't Laik" song was released, a play on the French word for secular.

In it he said, "Let's crucify the secularists like at Calvary... put fatwas on the heads of these idiots."

The rapper later admitted that "he went too far" in the song.

Medine said the song was to "secular fundamentalists what Charlie Hebdo cartoons were to religious fundamentalists".

"Provocation is only useful when it provokes a debate, not when it triggers an iron curtain," he told an academic conference on rap, the music magazine Les Inrocks reported.

However, Aurore Berge, an MP from French President Emmanuel Macron's ruling Republic on the Move party, said having him headline a concert at the Bataclan was an "insult" to the victims of the slaughter.

Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the opposition Republicans in the French Senate called on the government to prosecute the rapper in the same way as firebrand comedian Dieudonne, who was convicted of glorifying terrorism in 2015.